2012 LDS Temple Info Graphic
Click and drag to scroll through the LDS Temple Infographic. Click again to stop scrolling. Look to the bottom for simple controls.
Downloads:
Let’s be honest. You may never remember to come back and see next years info graphic, So you should probably bookmark, or share, or subscribe to my RSS feed. In the meantime…
Download both versions of the graphic in one convenient zip file. Either click and save, or right click and save as!
If you download, please re-share it! There are links for many popular social sites ate the bottom of this page.
Potential Issues
To make this infographic, I take screenshots of satellite imagery for each temple, then scale those images to each other. This gets their widths fairly close to each other. Then I take my models, scale them to fit the image, and, using information online, I fix the heights to be as proportionally correct as possible. While you can find the height of the temples online, the information is not always correct. The information also does not always tell you if the height is including or excluding the Angel Moroni or any other top ornamentation. This has led to some issues with this graphic that I had to make judgement calls on. The most severe calls are as follows:
Cardston
The height of the Cardston temple is listed EVERYWHERE as being 85 feet. Once the width and length of the model were scaled correctly, I scaled the height to 85 feet. This caused the model to become severely squashed. After much research and not finding any information that was conclusive, I scaled just the upper central portion of the temple to 85 feet. Suddenly the whole model looked accurate again, so I made a judgement call that the listed height did not include the base.
Boston
Boston Temple is listed online as being 83 feet high. However after scaling the base to the appropriate size, the height squished everything. I tried assuming I did something wrong with the length and width measurements, so I scaled the whole model proportionally until the height was 85 feet. This caused the doorway to become unbelievably tiny. I found a source that claimed the main portion of the temple was 58 feet. They had no reference to back this up, but scaling to match that measurement fixed the look. In retrospect, I should have left Boston off. I am still not happy with the end result, and will be doing more research on the next iteration of this chart in 2013. So take Boston with a grain of salt.
Gilbert and all points right
I have no credible information for anything that is currently or soon to be under construction. I put them in there to show what is coming and felt they completed the look. Hopefully, the 2013 Graphic will be more accurate for those as well.
The future for this LDS Temple Infographic
I hope to be able to make an updated version of this graphic around this time each year with updated info, corrected stats, and new temples.
See the photography that makes these models possible!
Can you do Oquirrh Mountain soon? I forwarded this link to my whole ward (I do a weekly temple email for my calling), and we would love to see it. In fact, our ward is right behind the Temple, so it would be cool if you actually showed some of the houses to the west!
I will eventually be doing Oquirrh Mountain temple. It is currently on the half-done list. My workflow is complicated, but in short, here is how it works:
First: I model the grounds, then I model the temple. This can take 3 days – 2 weeks, depending on complexity. Then I add the trees and camera movement.
Second:, I send the work over to my render computer to render. Unfortunately, This is where everything bottlenecks. I have a very good computer, but rendering still takes between a week and 3 weeks for each model. Currently, I have 5 models waiting to be rendered, so even if I finished Oquirrh today, (Which I won’t unfortunately,) it still would not be ready for a couple of months.
This is awesome! I really appreciate the details about your design process. I assume you make the height adjustments in Blender? Do you line them all up and render at once, or does the line-up happen afterward in Photoshop?
I’m also interested in the motivation behind the stories you tell here – is there a reason the visual focus is on relative temple size (versus, for example, the time between different designs, or how many temples use the same designs? You tell some of these stories with the text, but the main visual focus seems to be on height)?
A little background: I’m a CS student at the U of U studying data visualization – I’m particularly interested in how graphic designers and work with data, especially when the data gets big, complicated, or misbehaves. You’ve clearly done a TON of research and data collection and encountered both of these problems. Is there anything you find yourself doing over and over again that you wish were more streamlined?
I am flattered you think my work good enough to be taking into consideration.An I am sorry I did not notice this sooner, I could have answered last night.
First: Height
I scale them to width and height in Blender first. I render them out orthographically (No perspective) which has the advantage of making them the same height regardless of how far away they are from the camera.
I render them singly, one at a time, saving them as .png files with a transparent background. Then I space them in a way that is, I kid you not, visually appealing. I have no strategy for how much overlap to give them, other than to give them some.
Second: Theme
I have always been more interested in the architecture of the temples than anything else. Especially more recently, as a single floorplan will get used multiple times before it is set aside. Even with this re-use of interior layout, the exterior can be vastly different. Payson and Gilbert (Both near the end of the infographic) are excellent examples of this.
Because of this, A physical comparison of the building made more sense to me, and will be the driving force for the next version. There are also other advantages to doing it this way. If I laid them out linearly by time, say an inch a year, well, first it would have to be 200 inches wide. It possibly already is, or soon will be, but beyond being long, it would have significant problems starting at the inch representing about 1997. There would be so little room between temples, you would not see the individual buildings. If I spread them out to compensate for the crowding at the latter end, then you have significant gaps between the early temples. Vast amounts of empty space.
You could scale the space, so an inch represents a year at the beginning, but 10 inches is a year for the 1990′s, but then you lose all sense of the scale of time through constant dilation and expansion. The end result is that you would end up with the temples overlapping slightly like they do here.
Third: Other Data
As for cataloging different designs, well, I can’t always prove designs are the same. For example, The statement I make about Albuquerque and Houston sharing the same ffloorplan is based upon three things: The relative size, The date of construction, and The exterior shape. I have no other proof. It is obvious with most of the small temples, but even amongst them, I count, so far, 6 different layouts. So I try to keep my conjecture to a low. I have many pairings that I think are the same, but no proof. I felt it best to stay on as firm a footing as I could, and even then, I have already identified many issues in the current document.
Next time, I won’t be completing it in 2 weeks for a school assignment, and I will put significantly more work into my verification process.
Thanks so much! This is really useful feedback! I’ve been interviewing graphic designers for a while, and honestly you have much more attention to detail and are more true to the data than most.
We’re planning to build a tool or tools to help with exactly this kind of heavy lifting, but we’re trying to be extremely careful about not limiting design the way we engineers do. As such, we’re trying to get as many use cases together as possible. I’ll keep you posted if anything actually comes out of this or if we cite your work in a paper.
I can’t tell you how nice it would be to have some kind of info graphic designing software. To be able to just drop in content, tag it with pertinent data, and have the software order it accordingly, that would have saved hours. It would be nice if it had some kind of auto formatting feature for text. I kept having to re-size my text boxes to accomadate the smallest grammar fixes!
Thanks for an awesome graphic. Excellent design.
Since you mentioned an updated version in the works, here are a couple things I hope are helpful:
1) It looks like the height of the Boston Temple is 139 feet. The 83-foot figure is probably the height as originally dedicated, before the addition of the steeple. Sources: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700205706/Mitt-Romneys-speech-about-Boston-temple.html?pg=all
http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?locale=0&sourceId=905dcb6a017cd010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&vgnextoid=7cecc8fe9c88d010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD
2) The Ogden Temple as remodeled should be the exact same height as before the remodel.
3) There are some minor typographical and syntax issues.
I hope that doesn’t sound too critical or detract from how much I liked the graphic. Really, this is awesome.
I have been trying to resolve Boston, thank you that helps. So it’s an 83 foot steeple on top of the temple, not an 83 foot temple. Wikipedia has that wrong. They made the same mistake with Provo. They have Provo as being 118 feet tall, but I was able to find an article from LDS Church news that said it was a 175 foot temple with a 118 foot spire.
Syntax and Typography are always changing, so I will look through that again.
I am going to disagree with you on Ogden though. The church has now released 2 separate renders of what Ogden will look like. The first one did have the spire at precisely the same height as the original. The second one however had significant changes to the design of the spire, which now appears to be higher than the original. It’s probably only a difference of about 3 – 5 feet though, so I made my spire to high. See both renders here: http://bottomofnothing.blogspot.com/2012/03/revised-render-for-ogden-utah-temple.html and note where the Moroni sits in relation to the cloud above it. If you figure that this is either a 10 foot or 12 foot tall Moroni, that makes the height difference probably about what I said before. Like I said, it’s a tiny change and I over pushed it.
I was reading about your ‘problems’ modeling the Boston Temple. Could it be that some of the measurements were ‘as dedicated’ that is, without the spire, or is it measured with the spire? I seem to remember there was some heartburn from some government organization about the height or something. The temple was dedicated without the spire and then after it was approved, they added the spire later.
The local residents were complaining about the proposed height. A court upheld a lawsuit against the church that forced them to build Boston without the spire. That version of the temple was about 50-60 feet tall, at least according to what I have read. The Church won an appeal and obtained permission to add the spire. everything I have read says that Boston is NOW 80 some odd feet. However, the spire takes the height of the temple to twice the height of the base, which should make the overall height right now around 100 feet.
It is turning out that I was wrong about Cardston, so I am probably wrong about Boston too!
Believe it or not Sen Ted Kennedy had a lot to do with the Boston Temple getting a spire. He made a comment that he could not figure out why people were upset about a church building having a steeple. He made a few other positive comments and soon the steeple was approved.
I believe it. He and Mitt actually worked together quite a bit over the matter. It’s nice when people can cross ideological lines to work together.
Very cool information. However, the Cardston Temple was not the first outside of the United States. The Laie Hawaii Temple was dedicated in 1919, about 30 years before Hawaii became part of the United States. It no longer is a foreign temple, but at the time it was.
A Good point, but Hawaii became a US Territory in 1898. It was part of the United States at that time even though it was not a state. Laie was however teh first temple outside of the continental United States.